Did Venus Have Oceans Of Carbon Dioxide? New Study Says It’s Possible

Venus is often described as Earth’s twin, but with a runaway greenhouse effect from excessive carbon dioxide. The planet closely resembles Earth in size, mass, chemical makeup, and distance from the sun. Those components, combined with the kinds of geological formations associated with water erosion, led scientists to hypothesize that Venus was once home to giant oceans, much like Earth.

According to Scientific American, there was prior research showing that the second rock from the sun held enough water to create an ocean across the entire surface of the planet about 80 feet deep, if it could just rain down from the atmosphere.

Now researchers at Cornell University are saying there were oceans, but they were made of carbon dioxide.

Modern day Venus is awash in carbon dioxide.

As the lead researcher for the study, theoretical physicist Dima Bolmatov, noted, “presently, the atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide, 96.5 percent by volume.”

But in order for there to be “oceans” of CO2, the substance would have to be in liquid form, something that should only be possible in extremely low temperatures (below negative 56 degrees Celsius). Yet, the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead.

So, how could liquid carbon dioxide exist on Venus?

The researchers explain that under extreme pressures, carbon dioxide can enter a “super-critical” state where it has the properties of both a liquid and a gas. Specifically, it can erode the ground like a liquid but still flow like a gas.

Not exactly the kind of oceans that would make for a day at the beach, but the amazingly intense pressure on the planet’s surface already rules that out. The atmospheric pressure on Venus is about 90 times greater than on the surface of the Earth. In the ancient times that the Cornell researchers are focusing on, that pressure could have been dozens of times greater. And that pressure may have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.

Those are the kinds of conditions needed for carbon dioxide to reach a liquid-like state and form oceans, according to Bolmatov.

So what would this liquid CO2 look like?

According to Bolmatov, it would have “looked like soap bubbles” or more specifically, “a bubble of gas that is covered by a thick layer of liquid.”

Now Bolmatov and his team are hoping to conduct further research on super-critical carbon dioxide. The full letter with their findings and hypotheses on CO2 oceans was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry and can be found here.

[Image Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS]